The Cloud computing environment is an enhancement to the predecessor grid environment, whereby multiple grids and other computation resources may be further abstracted by a Cloud layer, thus making disparate devices appear to an end-user as a single pool of seamless resources. These resources may include such things as physical or logical compute engines, servers and devices, device memory, storage devices, networks, business applications and other software, and the like.
As enterprises seek more cost effective/inexpensive services, many are considering the use of third party mail and storage solutions. One of the challenges in adopting enterprise use of such a service for business is the potential lack of security to sensitive data and intellectual property that may exist while data is in storage away from the enterprise's physical security controls.